Speak Not

God has been working with me a lot lately on speaking and not. What hills are “to die on” and what battles to walk away from. I spent a large deal of my childhood and young adult life not saying what I felt or standing up for my beliefs. It took me getting married to my husband and spending over 20 years with him to learn to talk, voice, speak my opinions.


When God works on your life, he gives plenty of practice in the areas he’s working on. For instance, just yesterday, I was in line for a sporting activity and was talking to a person I know about a recent baseball game. It was a seemingly friendly conversation; their team beat our team in a finals game and we were reviewing homeruns, errors, great plays, etc. It was all fun and games until this person essentially said that they allowed us to hit a homerun because the runs wouldn’t have won the game anyways.

Yes, he was right, we didn’t win. The homerun was hit with two outs on the board and we were down by three. Our next batter hit a single and the next batter struck out, leaving the score with us one under. We lost; they won.

I was stunned at the condescension, the arrogance and the mean-spirited unsportsman-like conduct of this adult man. I’m sure he thought it was funny. What I said was “Well, that was nice of you” (heavy on the sarcasm). But as we finished the activity and the afternoon carried on, I thought even more deeply about the attitude that statement portrayed.

This man, a coach of a baseball team that his son is on (he has coached for several years) thought it was acceptable to speak to another human being about what is essentially a game of chance. On any given day, any team can lose or win. It doesn’t matter who is pitching, batting, running or catching; everyone makes mistakes and sometimes games get lost because of those mistakes.

What was so hurtful to me was that this man found it funny that we lost. He missed the point that we had as much chance of winning as we did of losing. And it was neither him nor his team that created the allowance to win or lose. It was the way the game is played.

I wanted so badly to tell him off; to point out how juvenile and mean-spirited his comments were. I wanted to tell him that it was a poor show of principal to be so smug. Instead I just sarcastically said how nice it was to rub salt in the wound. After that the conversation ended and I concentrated on the activity we were at. I guess I still have a lot to learn regarding speaking my mind.